When faced with the daunting task of choosing childcare, there's one solution for many parents - to phone a friend. Despite all Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships (EYDCP) being obliged to operate a Childcare Information Service (CIS), the majority of parents are still not accessing the facility, or are unaware of its existence.
Respondents to a small-scale research project by Foluke Ajayi and Viv Moriarty at the Institute of Education, University of London, most frequently consulted other parents, family, friends and neighbours when they needed childcare. Despite saying they were concerned about different settings' reputations, few of the parents had used the booklets and directories made available by their local authority and preferred to rely on informal sources of information.
Sara Willis, lead officer for Southwark EYDCP, is not surprised by the findings. She says, 'As a parent I would say that people are more likely to visit a childminder or nursery if they know someone else who has been there. Parents want reassurance, someone to say what it is like and check it out to know the story behind the facade. People still prefer to go with someone's recommendation - which is not necessarily the best way to choose childcare, especially as the situation could have changed since they were there.'
Publicity duties
But the CISs are invaluable for parents who do not have a support network of friends to ask, if they do not understand what assistance they are entitled to, or if they have special requirements such as shiftworking.
The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has left local CISs to monitor their own progress on making information available to parents, but it has plans to commission some formal evaluation of services in the future. A DfES spokeswoman says, 'The CISs are still at too early a level of development to make such evaluation worthwhile.'
National Day Nurseries Association chief executive Rosemary Murphy says parents continue to rely on word-of-mouth to choose day nurseries. 'Our members do not report that the CIS is particularly wonderful, they just regard it as another form to fill out,' she says. 'I imagine there are very few nurseries at the moment whose parents had found out about them through the CIS. It is another avenue for parents but I certainly don't think it will change the face of childcare.'
Partnerships are required to advertise their services so informed childcare choices can be made. 'The planning guidance states that each partnership should ensure that its CIS should take appropriate steps to publicise itself, including the production of a marketing plan. The CIS should make its publicity available in a wide range of outlets appropriate to the area, actively targeting those groups or communities who could most benefit from the services it offers,' says the DfES spokeswoman. A total of 15m has been made available through the Childcare Grant for partnerships to fund their CIS in 2001/2002 and the same amount will be made available in 2002/2003 and in 2003/2004.
Essex CIS has been operational for six months and is struggling to overcome the culture of parents swapping information at the school gates. 'We have advertised on local buses, in magazines, doctors' surgeries and local newspapers. We have put a lot of effort into selling ourselves but the message still isn't getting through,' says Essex EYDCP communications and marketing manager Tony Adams. He is consulting a marketing specialist to try to solve the problem of how to best target parents of pre-school children.
Popular forms of advertising used by partnerships to promote their CIS include posters and leaflets being available in doctors' surgeries, libraries and schools and distributed by health visitors, local newspaper adverts, local authority publications, stalls in town centres and supermarkets and websites. Lancashire EYDCP's CIS has found that it is receiving more callers since advertising in the Yellow Pages. The EYDCP information officer Ellen Fincher says, 'We conducted a survey into where parents look for childcare and a large number said the Yellow Pages, so since April we've been advertising the CIS in there across the county. Since April, 12 per cent of our callers have come from that source.' Southwark CIS logged 1,926 calls last year asking for information to be mailed out. 'But there are 67,345 of the population aged 0-14, so the number of calls is not very high, just a fraction of the people out there,' says Sara Willis. 'We aim to enable people to use the services more.'
Early days
NDNA chief executive Rosemary Murphy says that the CISs have to be given time. 'It is a new service and it was never expected that parents would immediately phone the CIS. As the service gets older parents will start to use it more and more. If they find it is good and they get accurate information, then it will spread by word of mouth.'
This is happening for Portsmouth CIS, which was launched two years ago. CIS manager Tracey Messer believes they are finally getting the word to relevant parents. 'We started off with an average of 52 enquiries from people in September 1999 and we are now up to 600 people a month. January has been our busiest month so far with 836 callers. People actually now find out about us and pass it on to colleagues and friends.
'There are 28,000 nought to ten-year-olds in Portsmouth, so there is a minimum of 10,000 families. We've had 5,000 enquiries so I think we are infiltrating the community.'
A successful initiative has been to take their database to groups including breastfeeding, post-natal and Homestart meetings. Along with helping parents to choose the childcare best suited to their needs, the CIS also informs people of their entitlements. 'People have said that the free nursery provision was confusing without our help. We are able to tell people what they're eligible for and make sure people can access that. We also try to make people aware of Working Families Tax Credit,' says Ms Messer. 'There is a lot of work the CIS can do. Our next strategy in Portsmouth is to make sure we infiltrate hard-to-reach groups such as ethnic minorities. We have made a start by having an information assistant who is linked to Sure Start.
'We've had feedback saying that we've been very helpful in finding information, people new to the area have found us useful and one respondent said we'd made looking for childcare a doddle,' she adds.
Southwark CIS is also tackling the task of getting its message to hard-to- reach families, but it is faced with a lack of resources even though the partnership has added more funding. Sara Willis says, 'We need to look at doing more outreach work so we can explain to people what is on offer. We only have a take-up of 83 per cent of three-year-old places, so there are still families who may want free childcare but are not getting it. Some ethnic minorities understand about free schooling but do not understand the childcare system and do not know what playgroups or nurseries are and that they are entitled to places.
'But we do not have the time or the resources to do what we want. It is a Catch-22 situation, because we want more people to use the service but we need a whole team of staff to cope with the calls. We have just taken on another member of staff, but even with three people working full-time it is hard and we can't get to outreach groups.'